I was speaking to one of my state’s (USA) herpetologists yesterday. They emphasized that iNat has actually become more of a hindrance than a help to themselves and some of their fellow scientists (why they often recommend documenting herps in HerpMapper vs iNat). Part of the reasoning was that protected species were not obscured as well as needed. A couple of their additional points:
If someone was documenting multiple species at one time and only the one protected species was obscured, poachers could easily pinpoint the general location of the protected species.
State scientists do not have access to the data like they do on HerpMapper. Obscured species on iNat requires them to track down the individual observer to ask them for the location data so that they could document the location for research. On HerpMapper they have access to the data as scientists and do not need to track down the observer.
Obscured data does not always keep the obscured species within the general county it was located. There have been instances where an obscured species looks like it was found in one county but upon discussing with the observer they were actually found in another. This slows research down. Giving actual scientists access to location data may correct this issue though.
Are there any other scientists on here who have experienced similar issues? Do you have thoughts on correcting this? Knowing this information was pretty disheartening considering I had thought and hoped my documentation was actually being used by scientists but it sound like the app has caused a lot of grief on top of being only somewhat helpful.
In short, yes. iNaturalist data is helping many scientists with many projects. A large and growing number of published scientific papers attest to this.
Sounds like herpetologists working with rare reptiles and amphibians are seeing real problems with iNaturalist data. Most other species do not automatically have their data obscured and most are not at high risk of poaching, so this is simply not a problem with them.
A work-around for your herps in your area: set up an iNaturalist project for herps (or other species of interest). Encourage people to add their herp observations there and trust the administrators of the project with the real locations of their observations. Include researchers you trust as administrators of the project. Publicize the project with both researchers and observers.
Ну, я занимаюсь дичающими интродуцированными растениями, иНат позволяет посмотреть их наблюдаемость в городах, но, нередко, мне приходится выставлять галочку “в культуре”. Ну и, касательно и других живых организмов, я могу выйти на точку по координатам и посмотреть в живую, что там на самом деле, сделать уже ряд своих наблюдений для иНат.
Плюс иногда можно обнаружить интересный рельеф, биотоп и идти уже смотреть конкретно его.
Ну и пространственная структура своих наблюдений тоже бывает полезна.
If i were an herpetologist working in a certain area, i would make a collection project, asking observers to join and trusting me with their hidden coordinates. With iNat it’s sometimes not enough to wait for free data to come to you, you have to join, make a collection project and talk to people.
While the obscuring mechanism on iNat is certainly not perfect, i find it fair that people including scientists have to at least ask before they use obscured data.
In my experience, If a broad category as state scientist have acces to HerpMapper poachers will end up having acces to it, if they don’t have it already. Thats the same for national databases of any sort regarding protected species.
That’s a good point. I will also say that HerpMapper is a bit clunky so I wouldn’t be amazed if someone is able to get around some of the security, unfortunately.
I tend to disagree with your state’s herpetologists. Sounds a bit like they are gatekeeping locations of species that might not be of any interest for poachers, with some exceptions.The thing is that a species can be vulnerable in one location and thriving in another. There is no one solution that provides a level of location obscurity for every locality. A lot of IUCN listed species are obscured by default, which can be a good thing, but also a big hindrance for researchers.
“Additionally, obscured occurrence records, particularly for vulnerable taxa, may have influenced the accuracy of the projections. Especially manipulations by iNaturalist that obscure IUCN Redlist species by default are troublesome for gathering ecological data about threatened species. Although obscuring observations can be a good practice for aiding in the conservation of sensitive species, it can limit conservation efforts by researchers, especially for highly threatened taxa and this strategy might need re-evaluation [50].” - Deschepper (2025) Snakes in Europe Under Climate Change: Is It Getting Too Hot for the Cold-Blooded?(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bod2.70005-)
The study where the citation comes from heavily relies on citizen-science data and there are many good examples of studies that harness the power of mass collected data. So yes, your data is valuable, but at the same time we have to acknowledge that data confidentiallity and obscuring of observations is not perfect and it really depends on the stakeholders you are talking to.
So what is the correlation between scientists as a whole, and the “obscuring” function on iNaturalist?
Science contains more than conservation. People study more than endangered or rare organisms. There’s a ton of information and data generated by iNaturalist that is incredibly useful for the vast amounts of research being done at any one time.
Yes, this is a known issue that iNat mentions in their help files. Users can take steps to avoid this (e.g., obscuring all observations from one day, etc.). But there are many ways that location can be guessed that don’t rely on interpolation as well (e.g., there’s only one site with suitable habitat in a country/obscuration rectangle, etc.). iNat has issues with geoprivacy, some specific to the platform, but the general issue extends to other platforms (social media, HerpMapper, etc.). If someone really doesn’t want a location to be discoverable, they shouldn’t post it online.
Many states have projects that allow users to share their iNat info with state researchers (e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/maryland-biodiversity-project ). It’s a little more work than HerpMapper to get up and running, but certainly viable. I don’t really think it’s fair to call this a “hindrance” however. The choice is between just getting data from HerpMapper or getting that data plus some more from iNat. On the other hand, iNat data is certainly more widely available to scientists than HerpMappers. There are thousands of data downloads by worldwide users. Many scientists may have no idea that HerpMapper even exists, and therefore the data there are unused by them.
This:
generally shouldn’t be the case. Counties are standard places in iNat, and obscured observations are indexed to them, see:
Any issues found could be from the observer entering location info incorrectly (which can happen anywhere).
There are thousands of articles published using iNat data primarily (and thousands more that just use data from GBIF which includes iNat data). I know of no similar numbers for HerpMapper. Putting (accurate) data on iNat in general certainly helps the scientific enterprise broadly. For specific cases, iNat may not be the best tool (or the researchers may not know how to use iNat as well as they could). But in general, the answer to the question posed in the thread’s title is clearly “Yes”.
iNat is also NOT JUST helping scientists - it is also helping conservationists. Two examples from my area:
The state-funded organisms that receive, rehab and release fauna from illegal traffic and car collisions, surrenders, etc. in my country uses iNat data to know which species are already present in each nature reserve, to know where can they release the species they receive when they are ready.
A local group from my neighbourhood that is maintaining and rewilding a state area to promote a law to make it an official nature reserve is also using iNat data to survey which species are returning to the area as the efforts move forward, and also to monitor which invasive species are present and need to be controlled
I didn’t properly read this before replying, so I’ll try again. I find herpers/herpetologists to be a major outlier in terms of complaining about iNat revealing locations. That being said, the comment about iNat not allowing researchers access to auto-obscured data is 100% correct - that’s a huge issue for the usefulness of iNat data and frankly should be changed.
ie - iNat should have a mechanism where a state-affiliated researcher should be able to access true locations for any auto-obscured record. Manually obscured records by the observer should remain hidden for anyone, but there is no reason for example a Utah state biologist shouldn’t be able to access Gila monster records from St George.
The solution is not to push people to Herpmapper. That website is frankly incredibly clunky, difficult to upload records to, and is simply never going to have the reach of a general platform like iNat. The county line thing feels arbitrary to me. Allowing validated researchers access to auto-obscured data on iNat would solve the primary issue here IMO.
I think the problem is that you lose huge amounts of data by not having a data-request system, although admittedly I don’t know how much overhead it would require of iNat to implement such a system. Most people are not going to opt-in to projects like this, and the strength of iNat is having an enormous amount of casual observers providing more coverage than you could ever dream of with a dedicated team.
I agree that pushing people to Herpmapper - a clunky, hard to use, specialized system that is essentially worse than iNat in every way other than having a proper data sharing system - is not the solution. I care about my observations being useful for data, and even I gave up on trying to port everything over to Herpmapper because of how much of a pain it is.
Just a heads up a private location doesn’t fix this. The fundamental issue is that iNat moved a few years back from publishing dates for every observation to “soft hiding” them - they don’t appear, but can be retrieved via API commands. I am frustrated by this compromise system because it gives users the appearance of hiding the timestamp, while anyone who would actually do the interpolation trick can easily obtain it. I wish they had picked one - either keep the timestamps public and don’t give people false security (my preferred solution), or actually fully hide timestamps on private/obscured observations. The latter would be detrimental to iNat IMO, but it WOULD actually provide the security that your average casual user currently thinks they have via auto-obscuration.
The actual fix is to either fudge the timestamp on the species you are trying to protect or to obscure everything for that day. I only rarely ever do either of things (the vast majority of auto-obscured species are not actually sensitive IMO), but if you truly care about protecting a specific observation’s location you have to do this to be thorough.
In Ontario the sensitive herp species are completely private, so in filters you can find that the observations of them are in Ontario but if you click on them it tells you nothing about where they were. Only the people in charge of iNaturalist Canada and the government species at risk project (and maybe some other projects) can see any location information.
Herpers seem to have the strongest opinions against iNat (maybe a result of a combination of the sensitivity of their targets and the type of personality that gets into herps) but there are some plant species that seem to have very dedicated poachers as well.
The way that the location is randomized is fairly intuitive (it goes to a random location within a rectangle around the original location) but people who have never used the platform before are often confused by it. “Why is it in the ocean/the wrong county/the wrong habitat?” It’s just a random location in the rectangle… making it obvious which county it’s in would help people narrow down the actual location.
I think this is more or less the answer you’re looking for.
What you described sounds like a bit of an edge case. I’m not sure what the best answer to the concern is, but as mentioned here, most research done here doesn’t usually involve a high risk of poaching.
I know that raccoons showing signs of domestication and the conclusion that hummingbirds prefer red flowers were concluded based on iNat data, neither of those are particularly high poaching risks though.
Again, not sure what the answer to this is, but I think you are describing an edge case, not the norm (not that it’s unimportant, just not the usual).
JMO but any researcher using iNat data is going to find it necessary to vet every single observation for accuracy, both for identification and location. Additionally, if they are doing research, it’s fairly obligatory to have a research methodology that has been reviewed at some state, national or academic level. Using that methodology, it doesn’t seem much of an additional burden to file a request with iNat to gain access to obscured data.